


so the spinners say

by kimaracretak



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Doriath, F/F, Gen, Magic, Nature Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:19:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26248567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: Goldberry in Doriath, as the years pass.
Relationships: Galadriel/Goldberry, Goldberry & Luthien Tinuviel (Tolkien), Goldberry & Melian (Tolkien)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18
Collections: Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang 2020





	so the spinners say

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Water is Lovely](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26343541) by [Unlos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unlos/pseuds/Unlos). 



> Art by the wonderful @unusuallysublimepenguin on tumblr / @Unlos on AO3. Full version [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26343541).

There was a time, when the world was more lonely than not, when Goldberry felt herself stretched across the whole of it. She knew the world before she knew the words for it - knew that she was vast, that the cracks in the world cradled her whenever she came too close to them, that there was a space beyond her where the animals fled.

Of all the things in the world that touched Goldberry, she loved most the light. She loved it where it spilled through the cracks in the sky, and she loved it where it finally shaded away into the fathoms where even she couldn't swim. She loved the sensation of it falling through her when she rose up as raindrops to the sky, and she loved the feeling of it warm across her when she rested as pools amongst untouched fields.

Under the light things grew and changed, and creatures came to Goldberry's world. Under their hands even the rivers tried to bend, yet still the arrival of others, and occasionally their own particular sorts of magic, did not trouble her, for the water was eternal. And in its eternity it always answered to her, even above those who commanded waters outside the realm of the river; her siblings on the wide seas - those children who came from Eru and not from the land - could not understand what she did, for while they had dominion over their realms they were not one with them the way she was.

So this was the world, in its youth, and Goldberry in hers: under starfall, filled with uncertain life that slowly sustained itself, that spread and grew and began to think about things like _possibility_.

She collected knowledge wherever she could: it wasn't difficult, because one of the first things she learned was that no matter the creature, they were more than willing to gift their secrets to the waters and trust that they would never be shared. The words came later: water, body, time, sleep. The body itself came later still, after a flood when she saw she would need one if she wanted the chance to clamber over the banks without the need to wait for another storm.

The first body was imperfect - pieces drawn from all the things she loved, because the thought of being only one thing seemed impossible. She gave herself long hair like the trailing roots of the lilies that bloomed in all her favourite coves, and warm brown skin that glowed with autumn light, and instead of legs she gave herself a tail, long and sleek like the silver fish that made their homes in her waters.

Most elements she kept, but she soon realised that no matter how she loved her waters, if she ever wished to venture past them she needed proper legs, and those she did adopt - but only sometimes, when the urge to explore overtook her faster than the waters could carve new paths. It was not a frequent urge, but Goldberry knew that she was different from the other living things that made the waters their home, and she could not be contained.

Her skin shifted over the course of her travels, but the first body remained the one she loved the most. And she grew to love a body, to love how it felt to be immersed in water while just separate enough that she could feel it, to love the snap of closing her jaws around the small animals that fed her when she was water and fed her in this new form still.

She loved teeth most of all, she thought.

Even with a body, she did not dare to venture too far away from the water. She did not want to think about drying out, about what changes the world might wreak across her body if she strayed. But the world was full of waterways, and she found that that was not too much a limitation, whether she walked or swam.

Goldberry discovered many things on those wanderings: trees that stood upright till they brushed against the dome of the sky and never once bent back down, flowers that bloomed with more colours than the water lilies she carried with her ever did, and numerous of Eru's children, the ones called Elves and Dwarves.

They had their lands, they had their families and realms and politics, and despite her hunger that knowledge slipped through Goldberry's mind leaving only traces of memory, because they were not what she wanted. Because what Goldberry did not find for a very long time, until she had long since lost count of the number of journeys she had been on, was anything quite like herself.

At first, she thought little of the green-cloaked figure under the towering trees. She had braved the labyrinthine paths slightly further inland today, and the elves were a common sight, though she hadn't seen one quite so alone before.

She blinked, and the figure seemed to waver at the edges, as if Goldberry were observing her through the top of a lake. When she narrowed her eyes the outline solidified again, into a woman's shape with long black hair woven through with silver chains and arms too long for her frame. Magic clung to her, magic was her, and the new sense of possibility surged once again in Goldberry's chest.

She did not mean to call out, not before she had learned more about her, but the tracks under her feet were unfamiliar, and a twig snapped as she took a step back towards the river.

The woman turned, and Goldberry saw then that her skin was pale, with the translucent sheen that Goldberry only saw amongst others like her who could change their skin at will: like the body she was curled inside was held in place by simple force of will. And what a force it was - Goldberry could tell from the surety of her steps, the light in her eyes so bright they may have been stars themselves, the way the grasses underfoot parted for her and birdsong trailed behind her the same way that currents parted for Goldberry whenever she wished to travel with speed. 

"It's all right," the woman said, as if soothing a wild animal. She stopped, and Goldberry held her breath, her invented heart sharp and quick like a rabbit in her chest. "You're not one of the children, are you? You're something new."

And, somehow, Goldberry felt herself relax at the words. The other woman recognised her, recognised her in a way that Goldberry had not yet realised she was wishing for, and though she was far from the river and the leaves cast shadows dancing across the cool dry ground, Goldberry knew that she was safe.

Still, "I feel very old," she said, because she did not know how to say: I do not remember a time when I wasn't, and the world wasn't, and wasn't that such a long time ago?

The woman laughed, and she sounded so like the rushing streams that nourished Goldberry whenever she woke that she found herself walking forward to take her hands. "You're cold," she said, running her fingers over the smooth backs of Goldberry's hands as though she had never had need to use the word before.

Goldberry was learning about words. She liked the way they felt between her teeth.

"I came from the river," she said, and she liked those words too, but they were missing something. "I am the river." But she was apart from it now - she was every river and more. "I am," she said, and the other woman just smiled, waiting. "I am the river's daughter. Goldberry."

And she felt herself smile at the words, felt the blood in her veins saying _yes, yes, this is who we are_.

She expected denial, but the woman smiled in return, the skin shining with the light from her eyes, the body underneath pale and blue like a body in the water. "Melian," she said, and Goldberry tucked the word away under her tongue. It felt like a secret, and, though she would only learn the word later, friendship.

"Melian," she said, and when Goldberry stepped back Melian followed. "I have been too long from the water, and you are such a treasure. Will you swim with me?"

"Of course," Melian said.

She sounded like a promise, like a dream, and the longer they walked, the longer Goldberry held her hands, the colder they became.

There were questions starting to gather in her throat like clouds, but in the moment, they seemed less important than Melian.

It was raining on the day Goldberry decided to give one of the questions burning under her tongue a voice. She was lying on the riverbank, one hand and most of her hair trailing idly through the water, and she could no longer bear even the companionable silence that had fallen between her and Melian.

"Why do stay the same, no matter the time I come to you?" Once she had begun, she couldn't seem to stop herself. "So many skins would suit you, and you could bring life to so many voices, and yet - you're still. Why do you not change with the seasons? With your realm?"

Stillness for Goldberry was for sleep and little else - the long sleeps that crept over her when the short days ceded themselves to nights that blanketed her in softness and dreams. Her body did not know stillness outside those spells - the waters under her skin still moved with the tides, her hair followed the whims of winds it had befriended even when the winds were nowhere to be found.

She thought, perhaps, that were she to stay in one form for too long, she would pass into what the Men called death.

Silence returned when she stopped speaking, and it was a silence that stretched on long enough that Goldberry began to feel she had made a terrible error.

"It," she said, more softly now, rolling over upright so she could regard her friend. "It is not that I do not appreciate you like this. You're beautiful, none could deny it, but your power is - is more than this vessel. Do you not see that?"

The words spilled from her lips like the worst kind of flood. Melian watched the whole time she spoke, a frown beginning to crease the lines of her forehead. 

"I am no more confined to this body than you are to yours," she said finally, the fingers of one hand worrying a loose thread at the edge of her green and silver sleeve. "I am in the girdle, and I am in the birds, and I am - it is no small task, to anchor myself here."

The last words were tinged with bitterness, and curiosity swelled in Goldberry's chest. She knew, of course, that there were lands beyond this one - she had been here alone once before, after all. And she knew that Melian's first home must have been one of them - a land at the far edges of a Sea Goldberry could not cross, a Sea that would sweep her away from her lands without a second thought.

And yet the idea of Melian being bound to either of those lands - Melian, so full up with more magic than blood - it did not seem to be what she deserved.

Goldberry retreated fully from the water reluctantly, the damp still clinging to her. She favoured loose dresses when this body needed garments, but the weight of the water pressed the dress so close to her skin that she rather felt it was painted on, save for where the wide neckline was pulled down her arms by the weight of the wet cloth. 

Yet Melian did not protest when Goldberry sat at her side and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. She had avoided the worst of the rain sitting close to the treeline, and Goldberry watched the pale blue of her dress darken where they were pressed together.

"You could be unbound," she said. Anything could be broken apart, by force or simply by the passage and gradual wear of time - though perhaps that did not apply to Melian. "You could shape the world. You are more like me than anything else that inhabits these lands."

"I do shape the world," Melian said, and her hand dipped under the wet earth, out of sight for a long moment until it appeared again, cupped around a small black bird. Goldberry could see its tiny chest rise and fall, but the beat of its wings against the cage of Melian's fingers was unhurried, and unafraid. 

Goldberry reached out a tentative hand, and a single drop of water fell upon the bird's head. It opened its mouth - perhaps to smile, perhaps to ask for more, perhaps to scream - yet no sound emerged. "Is something wrong with it?" She had never before seen a silent bird, not one that still drew breath.

"No," Melian said. "It is simply - unfinished. I have felt the song within a thousand types of birds rise through their throats, and this one has escaped me. My skin suits me now, and I do not regret leaving it aside while I attend to these works instead."

Goldberry laid her head on Melian's shoulder, watching the bird's beak bob back and forth as Melian stroked her fingers idly over its wings. She could feel every drop of water running from her hair down Melian's body, and she wished, not for the first time and not for the last, that she could have Melian all to herself - could take her underwater and show her truly what magic was when it was wild.

"Well," she said, and let the word rest between them. There was hardly any space there, and truly she wished for less - wished all sorts of things that she never would have wished, when she was a river, before she had a body. "Thank you for your works. The world is - I think it's less lonely now."

It was the first time she had sad the word out loud, lonely, had only ever heard it before, but as soon as she spoke it, she knew the truth of it. She had been lonely, before Melian, would be lonely after her, for no matter how long Melian stayed in this part of the land they called Beleriand Goldberry could not stay with her all those years. But for the moment, there was peace under the trees.

"I am glad you think so," Melian said. She tucked the bird back under the ground, pulled Goldberry into her lap as the rain began to ebb, pressed an affectionate kiss to the top of her head. "I do quite like knowing that there are other creatures like you in this world, even if you cannot stay."

 _I can stay_ , Goldberry thought, _Stay, perhaps, longer than you, who is bound to only a tiny part of this world._ Melian perhaps sensed her hesitancy, but said nothing further.

And this silence, Goldberry decided, was not lonely at all.

It would be a long time before she remembered that she never quite got an answer, but when she did, she would wonder if that contributed to how much time passed before she next saw Melian.

**

For many years, Goldberry followed the paths that Melian tread across the world. No paths could hide from the water's eyes, even if it wished to, but Melian made no attempt to hide her passage. She followed rivers when she could, left offerings along the sides - ripe fruits and berries, the kind of breads that Goldberry could have made herself, if she ever felt moved to put her mind to it. In return, Goldberry left her own treasures: pearls and shells from her dives deep into the black, fallen acorns nestled in the softest beds of waterlogged petals.

In these gifts, Goldberry saw their own shared fey language develop, and she knew that, no matter how long ago their last words together in the rain, part of Melian still remembered her with affection. She started, once, to dream of reunions: of crossing the Esgalduin and searching Menegroth for signs that Melian was hale and happy, of sitting by the fires of Melian's home until her skin was dry for the first time she could remember; of Melian walking into Sirion with her arms outstretched, eager, finally, to see what the world looked like through Goldberry's lens.

In the end, their reunion was more simple than she could ever have dreamed.

The stars had claimed the whole of the night sky, and Goldberry was sitting by an abandoned marchwarden's hut, letting her hair drip river water into her lap and eating the blooms and leaves from a small white flower she had never seen before. She had dressed herself in silver, though she had already forgotten why, and she was debating what to do with the few hours of autumn daylight remaining to her.

And then Melian stepped into the clearing, in a dress of deepest green paired with a white hood, a small bag in her hand and a nightingale on her shoulder.

"Oh," Goldberry said, scrambling to her feet, "Oh, is it that time, again?"

It was. Goldberry had done little to the inside of the hut - draped willow boughs over the bare rafters, purified the water that had grown stagnant in the spaces between the rotting floorboards - but there was space enough for them to sit together, for Melian to make tea and Goldberry to cook fish, and they passed hours together trading the stories of their lives apart, so freely that it was as if they had never been apart.

Two nights after that, things began to change.

When Melian brought a child to the river and laid her in Goldberry's lap, Goldberry felt the magic radiating from her even before she opened her eyes to see the child smiling up at her.

( _A surprise_ , Melian had said, and Goldberry had thought, _but what could surprise the oceans?_ But she had closed her eyes, because Melian had earned this and more.)

Goldberry wanted to smile in return, the way she had smiled at everything new Melian had shown her, but the worlds behind the child's eyes gave her pause. Looking at her felt like looking at the blackest depth of a river at the mouth of the sea, where the rocks dropped off into a different realm that Goldberry couldn't brave.

She was reminded of the moment with the nightingale, content in Melian's hand, but still bursting with life, and thought that the child had all of the life but precious little of the contentment.

"What a strange child," she said, and knew immediately that they were the wrong words. She didn't mean it unkindly, but words were still, sometimes, difficult - what sounded so beautiful when it was underwater or rushing over stones fell sharp and hard from her mouth.

Melian flinched, mouth flattening to a line. "She is my daughter," she said. "You've been gone for too long."

I am never gone, Goldberry thought, but perhaps silence was the better choice in this moment. She brushed a small tuft of hair away from the child's face, and didn't resist when the girl grabbed her finger in one strong fist. "I am here now," she said instead. "And your daughter is -"

Strong. Alive. Fated to be torn away from a world she was only half a part of, because surely her father could not have been one of the Maiar.

"Lúthien," Melian said, and Goldberry knew immediately she would never use the name. She is a part of me. And I want her to know you. To know that she can always find safety in the river, if you'll -" She stopped, cheeks flushing a deep red that nearly matched her cloak.

Goldberry wondered at such a gesture. Melian had no blood in any meaningful sense, neither of them did, so there was a calculation to her blush that Goldberry felt she was missing. Did Melian think herself presumptuous? She would know better than Goldberry how much time had truly passed between them, leaving Goldberry to be the one knowing that there was no such thing as too much time to erase their friendship.

Yet still - "I of all creatures cannot promise safety," she said, and surprised herself with the genuine regret that rises in her throat at the words. In her lap, the child hummed softly to herself in a language only she could understand. "My rivers and I have no guarantees, we simply are."

Melian sat down, not as close as she had been the last time they were together, and Goldberry frowned at her. The child let go of Goldberry's hand, only to immediately grab a fistful of the flowers and attempt to fit fist and flowers alike in her mouth.

"Not for eating, little one," Goldberry scolded. She herself had found the flowers tasty, sweet with an edge of something nearly like cinnamon that lingered long after she swallowed, but she suspected there was a chasm between what a river could eat and whatever this child was could. When she looked up from disentangling stems from small fingers, she looked up to find Melian smiling at her, wide and open as the sky full of sun.

"See," she said, "You're keeping her safe already."

Goldberry waited for the resurgence of jealousy, the contrary urge to feed the child the flowers after all - she had never liked sharing, and the longer she sat with Melian's daughter in her lap, the more she understood her feelings towards the girl who had taken part of Melian's spirit and bound it to yet another solid form. But they didn't come.

Something loosened in her chest, the breaking of a storm. "You know it isn't the same," she said. "I can do things for her like this that I cannot in other forms. And what if - what if winter comes, and I am asleep?"

"I am not asking the impossible," Melian said softly. "Simply that - that you will be there, if she needs."

Goldberry had never before thought she might offer such a thing, especially not in such a binding form as a promise. But as she looked between Melian and her daughter, she found herself saying, "Yes. If she needs."

**

The world was still dark, or perhaps it was beginning to grow dark again, when war began to rage across the borders of Nan Dungortheb. It was a strange war, fought more with magic and hearts than with armies and swords, and it shook the very foundations of the earth such that the tremors reached even Goldberry, where she slumbered in the mud flats and dreamed of hunting rabbits in the spring.

She woke slowly, carefully, the slow weary haze of a winter interrupted clouding over her eyes and winding around her bones. There was a wrongness that had crept into the land while she slept, and a fear began to coil in the depths of her heart.

Where was Melian?

Morning had dawned black, starless like it had been in the beginning of time, and it felt unfair, and wrong, the trees twisted around her and the leaves dry underfoot. She could feel her skin too keenly, as she searched for her friend, could feel the ash of the air trying to swirl strangling-close. And she could not see Melian.

Goldberry did not know how long she walked. It was not the soft timelessness of sleep, or of long days in the river watching the sun dance across her bare skin, but an awful disorienting lack, as if something had pulled her away from the land that she had come to think of as one of her favourite homes.

She stopped, suddenly, almost before she knew why. There was a border, like the moment freshwater turned to salt, and when Goldberry let herself slip sideways into her other sight - harder than it should be, even outside the water, almost painful - she saw stretching from beneath the earth up past the top of the sky a chain, golden and braided like the hair she herself had been wearing the last time she saw Melian.

When she touched it, she tasted protection, but also a great sadness.

"I had not wanted to do this," Melian's voice said.

Goldberry turned, stumbling with the speed of it, and saw her friend standing on the other side of the chain. She reached out a tentative hand, and found that though the barrier burned, it let her hand pass. When she touched Melian, she felt mostly bones, and in the eerie light shed by the gold, she saw Melian had grown thin and hollow. "Is this for the north?"

Melian nodded. "It is what I must do to keep my land safe. I do not think it will bind you, but -"

Goldberry nodded. "But it will make things difficult." She reached her other hand through, took Melian's hands in hers. "I will help you in whatever way I can."

Perhaps it would be little help at all, but Melian's smile seemed real, and Goldberry knew she had done well.

**

Galadriel changed things, although it took Goldberry too long to understand what. Melian's border had shifted the boundaries of home and familiar, but many things remained the same - too many things, Goldberry would know later. Galadriel was new in a different way. 

She came to Doriath with the ice of the Helcaraxe still in her veins and her teeth, and she was hungry in a way Goldberry had become unused to. A hunger that she nonetheless recognised, and wanted the way she had wanted little else since she gave herself a body.

Galadriel was not a friend the same way Melian was; indeed, Goldberry feared for a time that Galadriel would be the cause of great strife between her and Melian, for Galadriel's magic taste of the Sea, and she took to Melian's lessons poorly, stubborn and impulsive.

"She means well," Melian said, over tea in the house Goldberry had made her home. It had three walls, the fourth space open to Esgalduin, and Goldberry moved between the two with ease that few of her guests - in truth, none of her guests but Melian - appreciated. "Or, I think, she will do well, one day. She has promise."

"You say that about all your favourites," Goldberry said, and though her words we sly, she wondered if there was more hurt to them than she wanted to let free.

She was only slightly soothed when Melian said, eyes alight, "Not true. I said much worse about you."

Goldberry looked out over Esgalduin, and thought about the screams that it carried south from the border of Nan Dungortheb, louder than they should be under the shade but silent to too many of those she lived among. "We may have need of people like her one day," she said. She plucked a water lily from one of the bowls on the table, dipping it into her tea before eating it whole, but even that did not soothe her hunger. "But it does not explain why I find her so curious."

Melian raised an amused eyebrow, her gaze lingering on Goldberry's mouth. "Oh, I think you'll work that one out for yourself."

And Goldberry did, eventually - in the slide of Galadriel's bare skin against hers when they swam, in the kisses they shared in Goldberry's bed. And when Galadriel left, Goldberry realised for the first time that there was much more in the world than she had bargained for.

**

Goldberry held herself at the exact midpoint between the water's surface and the river's bed, and let her eyes fall shut. It was one of her favourite places, where the water was a precise shade of warm and the currents rocked her with enough force to soothe but not enough force to threaten. Here she found peace, and did not need to dwell on the feeling of her friend slipping away from her, or on powers wreathed in fire that wanted to waste away all things green and growing that she loved.

When Goldberry went to her refuge the river was covered in a thin sheet of ice: frostfall come later and weaker than ever before. The world outside was still reflected down at her, elongated and clouded by the ice, but it felt very far away. She could not quite move herself out of time - the seasons would never stand for it - but in shades of grey and green it seemed that time had decided to remove itself from her.

When she opened her eyes, there was a face looking down at her. She thought for a moment that it was Melian - her friend emerged at long last beyond her Girdle, and fear swept through her like a fire, for Melian away from Doriath now could mean nothing good.

But though the woman above the ice had many of Melian's features, there was more death in her eyes than magic, and Goldberry knew her immediately, the depths of her gaze unchanged since her childhood - grown, if anything, darker and full of the new knowledge of their own sadness.

Goldberry melted the ice above her with a breath, slowly enough that Lúthien could move away and not fall. She raised her head just far enough above the surface to speak, and the words were slow, heavy like the weight of her hair floating behind her.

"Life has changed you, little one," Goldberry said, and Luthien did not even protest the name. "Your mother has gone to great lengths to build safety for you, and yet you find me here beyond the golden chain. All children must rebel, and yet ..."

She had seen little of Lúthien over the years, had never managed to build the relationship with her that Melian had hoped for them. How could she, when Luthien's beauty covered something staid and dreadful? She would do much for Melian, which was why Lúthien still sat on the ice, but she feared the moment was rapidly approaching when she would be asked for something impossible.

"Death has changed me." Lúthien's robes were thin, and when she wrapped her arms around herself, Goldberry saw that they were thin too. Her cheekbones stood out sharp under her eyes, which were pale and hollow now.

"So it does," Galadriel agreed, and the hot uncomfortable thing flared again in her chest. "Many things are changed by death. I had hoped you would remain untouched."

Lúthien laughed, and there was no humour in it. Her body was trembling from the cold, but even had Goldberry wished to ease her discomfort she had nothing to give, not in the grey. "I could have been. But I met Beren, and he had no choice, so I ... made mine. My mother says that's why you don't like me."

"Your mother says a great many things," Goldberry said. She wanted to deny it - she had come, over the years, to dislike other people's sadness, had taken so many tears into the rivers that she felt full and happy when she could ease others' pain, and yet she had also come to understand that she was not good at lying. Rivers, it seemed, could only magnify the truth, and the truth was what Lúthien deserved. "Death is a natural part of many lives," she explained. "Yet not for you. You had to bring it upon yourself, and I ... I have seen too many of the things death leaves behind to wish that on you. Or, truly, to understand."

"Do you understand love?" Lúthien asked, and it sounded more tired than anything. And then, "Please, come sit with me," quick and quiet like she hadn't meant to add it on.

Goldberry complied, shaking her legs free from the tail that had bound them and weaving the water into a soft makeshift skirt before lifting herself onto the ice proper with only one backwards glance at her bed. As she did she thought of Melian sitting with her in the rain, about the shadows Ungoliant sent to fling themselves as sacrificial offerings against the boundaries of Doriath. She thought about Galadriel, long since departed, and she thought about Lúthien now, circling around a question she didn't want to ask any more than Goldberry wanted to have to answer it. "Yes," she said slowly. "But I do not understand why so many of you think it need go hand in hand with death. Is not love hungry enough on its own?"

"Sometimes I think death feeds it," Lúthien said. "Sometimes I think it is the only thing that can. Oh, I miss Beren."

It was the second time she had said the name, and Goldberry ran her fingers through the watery fringe of her skirt, asking, who?

The story flooded through her in images, and Goldberry's unneeded breath caught in her throat. "He was good," she said. "Wasn't he?"

Lúthien smiled sadly as she nodded. "And more," she said. "But time came for him. And it has for me, again. I thought it would be easier this time, but it isn't, and I want -"

"Not by my hand," Goldberry said quickly. She had killed more than her share of creatures, it was the nature of a river, whether she meant it to be or not. But purposeful death, to Melian's child - she couldn't.

Lúthien's surprise seemed real when she said, "No, I didn't mean that."

But she didn't elaborate. "Then?" Goldberry asked, and she did not allow herself to hope Lúthien would say: show me how to be like you.

"I want to go home," Lúthien admitted. There were tear tracks freezing on her cheeks when Goldberry let her gaze unfocus and slip past that curtain of Lúthien's hair. "I remembered your house on Esgalduin, and I thought -"

"I can do that," Goldberry interrupted once more. "Home, yes, I can do that for you, daughter of Melian, daughter of my friend."

And she took Lúthien's hand, and led her deeper into the river.


End file.
